Grab bag of questions--from effects to summons and more!

I've got tons of little small questions and issues, so I figured rather than make a dozen threads, I'd just do one big grab bag. You folks have been a huge help, and it is really great to be able to poke around in here for shared expertise!

So, in no particular order, here's stuff I'd love to know:

-Retaining items on summons with item slot; I've got a hero whose ultimate is to create a vehicle they can ride around in, and I'd also like them to be able to put items on the vehicle itself. However, when they resummon it, or it dies, the items it had held drop, instead of going with it. I have based the ability off of rexxar's misha summon. I am curious how to do this; I noticed that the lone druid in DOTA manages this with their bear.

-Items intended for specific kinds of units--mechanical 'parts'; under the same notion as above, I would like a shop for items designed for a series of vehicle-style units with inventories, which would not be usable by non-mechanical units. Is there any way to flag this naturally, or do I prettymuch have to police it via triggers?

-Positional sounds; I have a number of sounds I let loose via triggers for certain hero abilities--battle cries and the like. However, it is rather annoying for them to be heard globally, and I understand setting them up as a 3D sound can fix this. Unfortunately, when I do that, it seems that the sounds don't play at all--what should I set for the distances, or other settings, to make these more reasonable?

-'Explode' buff; I would like an ability to cause units afflicted with it to explode if they die while possessing the buff, similar to incinerate. Is there a way to do this without incinerate itself?

-'Empowered fists' -- a pugilist sort of hero is intended to have a series of autocast abilities to enhance their punching, but I can't quite seem to get the appropriate visual effect so far as attaching different glows to their hands, etc. Any suggestions for the best way to go about this?

-Stacking of effects; is there a general guide to which effects stack and which don't among evasion, critical strike, bash, etc? Is there a way to override if these do or do not in an easy fashion?

-Channel Aura -- Vexorian style--w/ audio and other effects; I would like to have a hero with a somewhat musical theme to be able to channel, a la big bad voodoo, an aura that provides numerous buffs to allies. Part of this, though, is that I would also like it to play 3D positional 'music' for their channeling duration (but cut it off if they stop). On an aside, where's the fairly silly 'rocking arthas' model? I'd like to position it overhead during this ability too.

-Spawn sticking; I cannot for the life of me seem to keep waves of units from occaisionally leaving some behind at the spawn. Here is how I have the damn thing setup to try and ensure they attack, but it -still- doesn't seem 100%:



-Last stand; I would like to set up a passive ability for a hero that triggers when allied heroes die to give them temporary invulnerability. I've got a pretty solid idea of how to do this, and I know it's pretty simple, but I figure I'll put everything in this post anyways just to cover all my bases for helpful advice.

-Genuine permanent invisibility; is there any way to -keep- a unit invisible even while they're attacking? I'd like to make a menace of these things if they don't have detection prepared.

-Fixing visual peculiarities with the blood mage; I have setup a blood mage hero who uses different tomes instead of the normal orbitting spheres. Trouble is, even though all I did was directly swap the model from the original spheres, for some reason it also attaches the books in the middle of his chest. How might I ensure it is just above their head? Similarly, is there any way to keep the bloodmage's sphere models from being affected by orb effects?


Thanks again for taking the time to look through this stuff!

Every summon is a different summon, you will have to create make a trigger giving the items to newly created summon.

Triggers is your answer.

For you to hear that sound your camera has to be on or around the sound point on the map. Also set the volume to 100%

I am not completely sure, bit i think there is explode on death trigger action.

I do now know the answer to stacking of abilities.

Never had read/installed/seen vex abilities system :P, but have heard of it.

Create a couple of friendly towers that do 0 damage, and every time unit gets attacked by the tower it will be ordered to move to the region.

Make a dummy unit cast the invulnerability on allied heroes.

No, units could attack the hero, but you can make him have a triggered ability with 0 seconds fade time so enemies could only respond to his attack emidiatly or never.

I do not know.

How do these look for facilitating the summoned unit items?

Uhh, Try Ghost (visible) or Ghost.


There is an action for this.

Yup that would work baron, suggest you look into 'for loop a' tutorials, makes work much easier/faster.

I'm trying to figure out why this ult isn't working. What it is supposed to do is drop an infernal rock and then shoot impale in numerous directions through the use of dummy casters.





The rock hits, but no impale occurs. The sorcerer units have the appropriate abilities.

No idea why, didnt look thru trigger whole way, but most of it is repetitive, once again i sugest you learn action 'for loop a do actions'.

If you wanted to use an SFX that isn't the generic "explode on death" model (such as a big explostion) you'd have to do it through triggers like these:
Might it not work because impale can't target a point? I'm pretty sure that it can only target units.

If that's the case, you'll need to create a dummy unit at the point of casting that impale can be cast upon. Then you'll have to move it with each dummy cast, or create a new one.

Also, the way that's set up leaks to hell and back because you're referencing "point offset by x distance towards x˚" which leaks unless you set that equal to a point, then tell your dummy unit to impale there, and then remove the point.

Impale is a shockwave spell, it can target a unit or a point.

The 'True' Perminant Invisibility with no revealing of the attacking units is easy, make a custom Perm Invis ability and look at the stats, there should be one called "Duration" or "Cooldown" with a number other than 0 in it. This is the 'fade time' or how long it takes a unit with this spell to become invisible again after breaking invisibility. Set it to 0 and it won't break invisibility when attacking or casting a spell.

Mmm... so you can tell I've not played enough Melee matches...

I have another idea as to what your problem might be: In the 1st trigger for your ultimate you have the line "(Unit-type of (Ordered unit)) Equal to Happy Sorceress". Aren't "Happy Sorceresses" your dummy units? If I'm correct, then this should read "(Unit-type of (Triggering unit)) Equal to Diego".

That might clear up the problem.

EDIT: If what Phoenix-IV said about invisibiliy doesn't work, you can always change a specific unit's transparency to be 100%. Also just make sure it has no shadow.
Or something like the above function (I don't know if that's word-for-word what it is).

I am having a problem keeping certain abilities--devour and transmute in particular--from targetting units which are essentially supposed to function as bosses, without making them heroes. I try tagging them as ancients and making acceptable targets non-ancients, yet it still lets it go through anyways. Ideas?

Check? Like check when the unit STARTS CASTING the ability, check the target. If it checks as a boss, tell the unit to stop. If you have WEU, you can make it display an error message.

My above-posted item triggers for the summon with item slots doesn't seem to want to give the items to it when it is brought back :( Any ideas what I did wrong?

Doesn't the wait negate all the current or last variables?

Take care.

Heaven is perfectly right. You're using "(Owner of (Casting unit)" which returns no value in your trigger. The reason for this is that after ANY sort of a wait command (no matter how short), the only unit functions that return values are "Triggering Unit" and Variables. To fix your trigger, change HammerTarget to an array with size 2 and do something like this:
Should fix it...

What does the Bombard upgrade have to do with this spell?